Carter Stanley wrote “Nobody’s Love Is Like Mine,” and the Stanley Brothers recorded it for Mercury on 30 May 1954 at Bradley Studio in Nashville, with Dee Kilpatrick producing. Carter sang lead and played guitar, and Ralph Stanley sang tenor and played banjo. Jim Williams played mandolin, Joe Meadows fiddle and Lightnin’ Chance bass. The record did not come out until January 1956, on Mercury 70789. Its B-side was Ralph’s banjo instrumental “Big Tilda,” cut at Bradley in December 1955 with a different band.
The singer makes a claim and then a complaint. He insists that no one is as faithful and kind as he is, and compares the truth of his love to the ocean. Then he hears that she has found someone else and is going far away. He asks why she has left him and resolves to go on dreaming of her, warning that one day she will be sorry for the way she treated him.
The brothers kept the song in their shows. Live tapes from the Shenandoah Valley Bowl in Edinburg, Virginia, on 3 June 1956 and from the New River Ranch in Rising Sun, Maryland, on 29 July 1956 both include it. Mercury put the 1954 recording on the LP Hard Times in 1963.
Ralph Stanley recorded it several more times with the Clinch Mountain Boys. A September 1971 session in Reidsville, North Carolina, had Keith Whitley on guitar and Ricky Skaggs on mandolin. On 18 February 1973 in Lexington, Kentucky, Roy Lee Centers sang lead, with Ralph on tenor and Jack Cooke singing bass, for Stanley Sound Around the World. A performance at McClure, Virginia, on 23 May 1975 came out on Rebel’s Live at McClure, Virginia, and James King sang it with Ralph in December 1985. In 1997 Skaggs came back to sing lead with Ralph on tenor for Clinch Mountain Country (Rebel, 1998). Other bands took it up too. Cliff Waldron and the New Shades of Grass recorded it for Traveling Light (Rebel, 1971), with Dave Auldridge singing tenor and Mike Auldridge baritone. Lou Reid sang it on When It Rains (Sugar Hill, 1991), with Tony Rice on guitar and Terry Baucom on banjo.
